The boxing gym was across the street.
Its blue floor was soft and dull: cornflower's
tongue, tepid sea. The coach was kind enough.
His name was Ralph. His shirt was clean
& nonspecific, the inverse of my moth-worn
Syracuse Lacrosse sweatshirt
from who-knows-where.
The first class would be free.
The gym was across the street.
From my apartment, I mean.
The five-floor walk-up full of art
students and great-aunts
with names that ring like elegies.
I live next door to a Planet
Fitness full of shiny people.
My arms are smooth as shellfish.
There is no time like the present to pray
for difference. This is how the hunted persist.

*

Christina and her friends threw me
up against the fence, held me there like a portrait
in a museum boasting free admission for students
under the age of 10. The chain-link made latticework
of my unremarkable back. When I fell to the ground,
the other children circled me like a hunger,
humor was no reliable salvation.
I stated my case thusly:
"8 on 1 can't be that much fun
for any of us, am I right?" The jury returned
in a flash, a unanimous decision to shake up
the show-off. From the blue floor
of our newly renovated playground,
Ian's face was all I could recognize.
I charged at him like a mother
walrus darting through the deep,
all instinct and tusk.
Ian fell as a tooth might,
his space in the phalanx
suddenly filled only by my supple
ghost.

*

My dad could beat up anybody
else's dad. I knew this largely through folklore
he spun from the day of my birth
until the first signs that his jet-black
curls would soon settle into winter.
In my unkempt head, the transition
from Jim Crow to Vietnam was as clean
as blood could ever be, two battlefields
branding him iconic, unkillable. He chased Tamara's ex
boyfriend through an entire apartment complex
with no break for breath or drink. Punched a hole
in a wall after a parent-teacher conference
ended with an indictment of his favorite son.
His third second chance. The youngest one.
The loyal prodigy, destined never to crystallize
into proper mirror, never master the alchemy
of knuckle blooming into broken nose, jaw left hanging
like a half-pendulum, red un-symmetry shaming
a stranger's face.

Joshua Bennett hails from Yonkers, NY. He is a third-year doctoral candidate in the English Department at Princeton University, Callaloo Fellow, and, as of this summer, teacher of 8th grade Composition. His poetry has either been published or is forthcoming in Anti-, Tidal Basin Review, Drunken Boat, Word Riot and Muzzle. He is also the founding editor of Kinfolks Quarterly.